Romney Victory, Looks Presidential and Human: Margaret Carlson

Oct. 12 (Bloomberg) -- A cardinal rule of politics -- that
endorsements are not worth the backslap they come with -- was
broken Tuesday night during the Bloomberg-Washington Post debate
at Dartmouth College, where Mitt Romney owned the night.

The difference was that Romney walked in with New Jersey
Governor Chris Christie, the Republican Party’s man of the
moment, at his side. Christie gave Romney the nod just hours
before, when his endorsement was at peak value. In general,
candidates have to go begging for endorsements while endorsers
take their time shopping around for the highest bid: a prime
time speaking role at the party’s convention; a cabinet post, if
not the vice presidency; a plane. By the time they’re done
looking, the endorsement’s depreciated.

This endorsement was given so soon and so strategically,
the result was emotional trickle-down. The most unloved of
front-runners got some of Christie’s spillover, and with it,
Romney broke free from his cramped and cautious self. He was
confident, expansive, authoritative and loose-as-a-goose funny.

I know, I know. He’s the stiff guy from Bain Capital LLC
who happily fired your brother-in-law; how could he possibly be
amusing? I swear he was, and it’s a big piece that’s been
missing from his campaign. People who know Romney insist he has
a sense of humor -- but they said that about Al Gore, too.

When Romney tries to be a regular Joe, he falls flat,
saying things like “I’m unemployed, too” to ordinary folks who
probably don’t think that being a full-time presidential
candidate and multi-millionaire is much like being jobless and
destitute. Or he yuks it up by pretending that a diner waitress
pinched his fanny. (Yes, he really did that.)

Lightness of Being

But there he was cracking three jokes, by my count, an
indoor record for him and maybe for any debate. What we regard
as funny are usually canned lines, like the not-quite-original
“My next-door neighbor’s two dogs have created more shovel-ready
jobs than this current administration” from former New Mexico
Gov. Gary Johnson in the last debate.

Maybe you had to be there, but Romney combined a lightness
of being with a seriousness of purpose that allowed him to break
with conservative orthodoxy and explain why the financial
bailout was a necessary evil. He dispensed Governor Rick Perry
of Texas without tangling with him, reminding him during an
easygoing defense of Romneycare, that Perry had a million
uninsured children in his state, hardly a record to be proud of.

For his part, Perry looked not like the doofus who couldn’t
spit out a logical sentence in the last debate, but like the
student who sits in the last row of class and hopes the teacher
doesn’t call on him. His answer to most questions was “energy”
or “jobs;” sometimes both. He claimed to have an economic plan
ready for release, but gave no sign that anyone had told him
what is in it.

Then there was Herman Cain, who just might extend his
boomlet through Iowa, where caucus-goers don’t mind using their
votes to make a point, as Mike Huckabee could tell you. Cain’s
repetitive hyping of his 9-9-9 plan came perilously close to a
Ron Popeil infomercial for his Showtime Rotisserie (“Set it and
forget it!”). An African-American former pizza executive who
proposes taxing the beer that goes with a large pepperoni, not
to mention bread and milk, will not win the nomination of the
Republican Party, which has been more white, but never more tax-phobic, in its history.

Too Simple

When Cain tried to burn Romney, criticizing his 59-point
economic plan for being too long and complicated, Romney shined.
He explained that there’s such a thing as being too simple, and
therefore inadequate to the task of saving a sinking economy.

Romney has a double-digit lead in New Hampshire, and his
head-to-head numbers against Obama are impressive, including a
55 percent to 37 percent lead among independents in a recent
Gallup poll. To help his campaign, Romney is hoovering up
Christie’s cash, with many of Christie’s New York money men
moving over.

Nature (and the media) abhors a static campaign, and there
will still be some surprises along the way. Perry has raised $17
million and could do significant damage investing it in ads in
Iowa and New Hampshire about Romney’s pro-choice, pro-health-care, technocratic past. The statute of limitations on Romney’s
crimes of reason may still have a few years left. But among the
eight candidates on stage Tuesday, Romney was the only one who
looked electable. What’s more, he looked human. That’s a lot to
get done in a night.

(Margaret Carlson is a Bloomberg View columnist. The
opinions expressed are her own.)